Have It Your Way, Charlie Brown

Peanuts Coronet #29

by Charles M. Schulz

Selected Cartoons From Sunday’s Fun Day, Charlie Brown, Vol. 2

Genres: Comics, Humor, Fiction, Graphic Novels, Cartoon, Childrens

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Charles Monroe Schulz was an American cartoonist, whose comic strip Peanuts proved one of the most popular and influential in the history of the medium, and is still widely reprinted on a daily basis.
Schulz's first regular cartoons, Li'l Folks, were published from 1947 to 1950 by the St. Paul Pioneer Press; he first used the name Charlie Brown for a character there, although he applied the name in four gags to three different boys and one buried in sand. The series also had a dog that looked much like Snoopy. In 1948, Schulz sold a cartoon to The Saturday Evening Post; the first of 17 single-panel cartoons by Schulz that would be published there. In 1948, Schulz tried to have Li'l Folks syndicated through the Newspaper Enterprise Association. Schulz would have been an independent contractor for the syndicate, unheard of in the 1940s, but the deal fell through. Li'l Folks was dropped from the Pioneer Press in January, 1950.
Later that year, Schulz approached the United Feature Syndicate with his best strips from Li'l Folks, and Peanuts made its first appearance on October 2, 1950. The strip became one of the most popular comic strips of all time. He also had a short-lived sports-oriented comic strip called It's Only a Game (1957–1959), but he abandoned it due to the demands of the successful Peanuts. From 1956 to 1965 he contributed a single-panel strip ("Young Pillars") featuring teenagers to Youth, a publication associated with the Church of God.
Peanuts ran for nearly 50 years, almost without interruption; during the life of the strip, Schulz took only one vacation, a five-week break in late 1997. At its peak, Peanuts appeared in more than 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries. Schulz stated that his routine every morning consisted of eating a jelly donut and sitting down to write the day's strip. After coming up with an idea (which he said could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours), he began drawing it, which took about an hour for dailies and three hours for Sunday strips. He stubbornly refused to hire an inker or letterer, saying that "it would be equivalent to a golfer hiring a man to make his putts for him." In November 1999 Schulz suffered a stroke, and later it was discovered that he had colon cancer that had metastasized. Because of the chemotherapy and the fact he could not read or see clearly, he announced his retirement on December 14, 1999.
Schulz often touched on religious themes in his work, including the classic television cartoon, A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), which features the character Linus van Pelt quoting the King James Version of the Bible Luke 2:8-14 to explain "what Christmas is all about." In personal interviews Schulz mentioned that Linus represented his spiritual side. Schulz, reared in the Lutheran faith, had been active in the Church of God as a young adult and then later taught Sunday school at a United Methodist Church. In the 1960s, Robert L. Short interpreted certain themes and conversations in Peanuts as being consistent with parts of Christian theology, and used them as illustrations during his lectures about the gospel, as he explained in his bestselling paperback book, The Gospel According to Peanuts, the first of several books he wrote on religion and Peanuts, and other popular culture items. From the late 1980s, however, Schulz described himself in interviews as a "secular humanist": “I do not go to church anymore... I guess you might say I've come around to secular humanism, an obligation I believe all humans have to others and the world we live in.”

Reviews

[Ninice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tres mignon je decouvre ce personnage et ses copains. Ils ont des crises existentielles, il n'y a pas d'adultes pour faire chier les gosses (du moins pas dessinés), la gamine est so "crabby". Et je me demande ce que signifie l'interjection "Rats!" quand ils sont outrés mdr j'ai bien fait de le prendre dans la boîte à lire de Morlaix. Je vais le deposer dans celle de St Maurice P.
Je recommande.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book 29 of the Coronet series, this is taken from “Sunday’s Fun Day, Charlie Brown vol 2” and was published in 1972, featuring strips from 1962 through 1965. This is earlier in the run than I usually read and the longer period is made obvious by some cartoons (Linus mentions 1959 and Schroeder has chickenpox in one strip and makes a point of not getting close to them but is perfectly okay in the next one. As always, there’s plenty to enjoy and my highlights included Snoopy skateboarding, leaf pressing, Snoopy standing in at the psychiatrists booth, the kite eating tree, Linus’ security blanket, dinner music for a dog, kicking the football and Fathers Day (which actually brought tears to my eyes). This isn’t a humourous as usual (which isn’t necessarily an issue, because there are some very funny strips), but there’s plenty of melancholy and it focuses heavily on Charlie Brown, Lucy and Linus - Snoopy doesn’t have any strips to himself at all - which is unusual for me, having read mainly the later books. A wonderful collection that really struck a chord with me (especially the Fathers Day strip), this is well worth a read and very much recommended.

[Kal1 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Its one of those mysterious magical books that is sitting in your books cupboard with its tattered spine, old dark yellow pages, smell of timelessness. You don't know where it came from or to whom it belonged but its always been there in your cupboard. When you grow up you pick it up and recognize the cover and some memories associated with it start to surface, they make you feel innocent and curious. You vaguely remember reading it on a beautiful summers day, but you dont remember anything specific. It cant be helped now, you open it and read it from start to finish in one sitting, all the while enjoying those feelings of innocence you once had.
Besides all that its a really smart, humourous, philosophical and fun read!